Community Trends: show opened/closed issue deltas (candlestick-style) #60
Description
Community Trends: show opened/closed issue deltas (candlestick-style)
Problem
The Community Trends chart currently shows openIssues as a single line — the point-in-time count of open issues each day. This hides the churn: a day where 3 issues were opened and 3 were closed looks identical to a day with zero activity. Users can't tell whether the issue count is stable because nothing happened or because opened and closed cancelled out.
Current display:
Open Issues: 6 ── 6 ── 6 ── 7 ── 7
What this hides:
Day 1: 6 open (quiet)
Day 2: 6 open (+2 opened, -2 closed — active day!)
Day 3: 6 open (quiet)
Day 4: 7 open (+1 opened)
Day 5: 7 open (+3 opened, -3 closed — very active!)
Proposed solution
Add a candlestick-style visualization that shows both the net open count and the daily opened/closed breakdown, similar to how financial charts show open/close/high/low.
Option A: Stacked bar overlay (recommended)
Keep the existing openIssues line, and add a stacked bar chart behind it showing daily deltas:
┌──┐
▓▓▓▓ │ │ ▓▓▓▓ ▓ = opened (green bars going up)
──────────────────── ─ = net open issues line
░░░░ ░░░░ ░ = closed (red bars going down)
└──┘
- Green bars above the axis: issues opened that day
- Red bars below the axis: issues closed that day
- Line: net open count (existing behavior)
Option B: Floating bar (true candlestick)
Each day shows a floating bar from min(open_start, open_end) to max(open_start, open_end), colored green if net positive, red if net negative. Wicks show opened/closed counts.
Option C: Tooltip enrichment (minimal)
Keep the current line chart but add opened/closed counts to the tooltip on hover. Lowest effort, still informative.
Data requirements
The current schema stores only openIssues (a single integer per day). To show opened/closed deltas, we need one of:
Approach 1 — Compute from consecutive snapshots (no schema change):
// Delta between consecutive days
var delta = today.openIssues - yesterday.openIssues;
// delta > 0 means net opened, delta < 0 means net closed
// But can't distinguish "0 activity" from "equal opened/closed"Limitation: only shows net change, not gross opened + gross closed.
Approach 2 — Fetch Issues Events API (workflow change):
// GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/issues/events?per_page=100
// Filter by created_at for today, count "opened" vs "closed" eventsStore per-day: { issuesOpened: N, issuesClosed: N, openIssues: N }
This gives the full picture but adds an API call to the workflow.
Approach 3 — GitHub Issues timeline (workflow change):
// GET /repos/{owner}/{repo}/issues?state=all&since=YESTERDAY&sort=created
// Count new issues (created today) and closed issues (closed_at today)Recommendation
Start with Approach 1 + Option C (tooltip enrichment from consecutive-day deltas) as the minimum viable version. This requires zero schema changes and zero workflow changes — pure dashboard-side computation. Then graduate to Approach 2 + Option A (stacked bars with real opened/closed counts) when the workflow can be extended.
Acceptance criteria
- Community Trends chart shows daily issue change direction (at minimum via tooltip)
- Users can distinguish "quiet day" from "active day with equal opened/closed"
- Works with existing
dailyHistorydata (consecutive-day delta computation) - Stretch: workflow fetches actual opened/closed counts per day
- Stretch: stacked bar overlay showing opened (green) and closed (red)
Related issues
- Refs Community Trends shows stale star counts while Star History is correct #51 — Community Trends stale star data (same chart, different fix)
- Refs Community Trends chart shows negative y-axis for Stars #25 — Community Trends negative y-axis (same chart, prior bug)
- Refs Daily referrer delta tracking — per-day counts from rolling-window snapshots #46 — Daily referrer delta tracking (similar delta-from-snapshots technique)